The Elasticity of Time (Part 1)

(The “Bombay Clocks” photograph is courtesy of Natmandu).

Although most of us are enslaved by the clock, linear time broken up into hours, minutes, and seconds is a creation of man. Hunters and farmers needed a calendar of the seasons as a way of predicting the coming of rain or snow, of heat and cold, and for knowing when it was time to plant and how long they had to wait until the next harvest. To make it more convenient for people to meet and transact business, the calendar was further divided into days–based on the earth’s rotation, and the days into hours. Today, the clock–a tool that was created to make life more convenient for humanity–has become a dreaded instrument that records time inexorably slipping by. However, there are ways to regain control of time and to remind ourselves that time is not rigid and unyielding but, instead, time is elastic. Below you will find five ways to stretch your time.

1. Use Your Time to Work Toward Achieving Your Ideal or Ultimate Life

There’s a vast difference between spending your time on 20 tasks that keep you busy, but are taking you nowhere, than it is to spend your time on 20 tasks that are moving you closer to achieving your life’s goals. When planning your day you need to start with the big picture in mind: start by looking to the future and describing what your ideal or ultimate life looks like. Then set milestones toward creating that ideal life, and then further break down these milestones into the smallest chunks you can think of. You then return to the present and plan each day based on the small steps you have identified which will steadily move you toward achieving your goals.

By planning each day based on the small things that you can do on that day to steadily move you toward achieving your short, mid, and long-term goals, and toward creating the ideal life you have envisioned, you’ll be making optimal use of your time. Continually look to the future and see what the destination you’re aiming for looks like, and then return to the present and take the necessary steps to make it happen.

2. Apply the Law of Straight Lines

The Law of Straight Lines from Mark Joyner’s “Simpleology” points out that the shortest path between two points is a straight line, a basic principle of geometry. This law dictates that you should take the easiest, shortest, most direct route toward achieving your goals. That is, as you go though your day you should make sure that the actions you’re taking are necessary—and not “filler activities”—, and that you take effective action, defined as “action which moves you in the direction of getting what you want”. The problem is, we’re bombarded by so many different distractions throughout our day that many times the straight line—the shortest route to achieve your goals–seizes to be obvious. People have a tendency to add unnecessary, ineffective steps to the route, such as:

• Spending time on low priority activities that could have been eliminated from your schedule all together.

• Wasting time shuffling papers, chatting online with friends, twittering away, aimlessly surfing the net, and so on.

• Creating problems that don’t exist.

• Jumping around from activity to activity, starting several things but not getting any of them done.

• Spending 15 minutes looking through your desk every time you need to find a paper clip because your desk is disorganized.

Teresa Romain, Founder and President of “Access Abundance”, teaches a similar concept which she calls “a 2-degree shift”. To understand the concept of a 2-degree shift, take a pencil and a piece of paper and draw a circle. Draw an “x” at the 12 o’clock mark and label it “true North”. At the 1:00 o’clock mark, draw another “x” and label it “magnetic North”. Now suppose you’re at “magnetic North” and you want to be at “true North”. You could take the route which takes you 358 degrees clock-wise around the whole circle. This route is slow, discouraging, tedious, and it’s so long you might never even get there. Instead, you could simply do the 2-degree shift to the left and you would reach your goal, getting to “true North”, by a much shorter and quicker route. Developing new habits;, new thoughts, new beliefs;, and new actions; will allow you to find 2-degree shifts.

3. Get Others To Do Tasks You Don’t Enjoy or At Not Good At

Consider hiring someone to do the following kinds of jobs for you: tasks you’re not good at; tasks you don’t enjoy; noncreative, repetitive tasks; or when you simply have higher priority tasks to complete. Here are some examples of tasks you could hire other people to do for you: get a cleaning company to come in twice a month and clean your house; pay a neighborhood kid to mow the lawn; do your grocery shopping online and have the supermarket deliver your food items; hire someone to create the brochure for your one-man operation; hire a caterer to prepare the food for the party you’re hosting instead of cooking it yourself; get a virtual assistant to answer your business phone for you; hire a handyman to put up the bookshelves; and so on. This frees up time so that you can accomplish high priority tasks and/or tasks you enjoy.

4. Create Passive and Portfolio Income Instead of Relying on Earned Income

One of the biggest uses of our time is the generation of money. In order to make time elastic, you need to stop trading your time for money. You do this by switching your focus from earned income to passive and portfolio income. Another way to think of passive and portfolio income is as residual income. With residual income you work hard once, and it unleashes a steady flow of income for months or even years. You get paid over and over again for the same effort. That is, you get paid multiple times for every hour of work and the stream of income continues to flow whether you’re there or not. Therefore, you can spend your time doing things other than working for money. In addition, how much money you make is not determined by how many hours you work, but by how many residual streams of income you create.

5. Allow Yourself to Be Pulled Forward by Coincidences

A coincidence is the noteworthy alignment of two or more events by mere chance, or without obvious causal connection. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung devoted a large part of his work to the study of “meaningful coincidences”, or synchronicity, and how seemingly chance occurrences can move our lives forward significantly. For example, you’re looking for work; while waiting for the bus you strike up a conversation with the gentleman waiting next to you; he tells you of a job opening in his office which is exactly what you’ve been looking for; you apply for the job and are hired. While you could have spent months looking for a job, this chance occurrence cut your waiting time drastically.

So how can you foster coincidences in your life? By putting yourself in harmony, you create an environment within yourself that attracts coincidences and synchronicity. You can create inner order–or harmony–through meditation, yoga, tai chi, breathing exercises, or even by spending time in mindful contemplation in nature. If you would like to learn more about coincidences, read my post “The Other Side of Productivity: Coincidences, Synchronicity, and Serendipity”.

Conclusion

Although we’ve grown accustomed to thinking of time as something that simply ticks away as we stand helplessly by, time is in effect malleable, and there are many ways to either speed it up or slow it down. In future posts I’ll be covering other ways to help you turn time into an ally.

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Tagged as: Delegate, Law of Straight Lines, Simpleology